A party-political broadcast released this month by the Green Party featured a councillor who had previously denied Hamas’s atrocities on October 7, the JC can reveal.
The clip, endorsed by the party and featuring its co-leader Carla Denyer, included an appearance from Mohamed Makawi, a Bristol councillor who apologised last year after it emerged that he shared a series of social media posts suggesting that Israel was to blame for civilian casualties sustained in the October 7, 2023 massacres.
In November 2023, Makawi shared a post on X which claimed that the “Zionist enemy police" believed the 360-plus people murdered at the Nova dance festival in southern Israel may have been killed by an “Israeli plane”, which the IDF has strongly denied.
Another said it had been confirmed “beyond a reasonable doubt” that “the Palestinian resistance... targeted Israeli military sites on the 7th of October, and that most of the dead Israeli civilians were killed by the Israeli army or during an exchange of fire”, and that talk of Hamas’s terrorist attack was just an "American-Zionist lie".
Again, Israel has denied that its own forces were responsible for the deaths of civilians and reports that around 800 of the 1,200 people murdered that day were not military personnel.
The Green Party refused to suspend Makawi at the time he made the remarks and said it had given him “social media training”. However, the party refused to specify what the training involved.
A spokesperson told the JC: "This is re-run of a story for which Mohamed Makawi apologised at the time. The Green Party abhors antisemitism, is clear that the Hamas attacks on 7 October were a terrorist atrocity and recognises Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide."
But the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, Lord Mann, had previously contacted the Green Party about Makawi and a number of other Green Party candidates’ social media posts.
Mann told the JC: “A public apology during the broadcast would have been more appropriate”.
It comes after the party supported another of the councillors raised by Mann – Abdul Malik.
Malik, who is also a magistrate, had initially denied sharing a Hamas video, despite evidence appearing to show him doing so on Facebook.
He later admitted sharing the clip during an investigation by the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO), the regulatory body for magistrates, which culminated in a hearing before the legal watchdog.
Although Malik claimed he did not support Hamas and had removed the post as soon as he became aware of it, the JCIO said that his actions “amounted to serious misconduct” and “had a detrimental effect upon the dignity, standing and good reputation of the magistracy”.
And, just last month, the party said it stood by a London councillor who compared Zionism with Nazism.
The JC revealed that Hau-Yu Tam, who was elected as a Labour representative but later defected to the Greens, retweeted a post that said: “Zionism is pure evil and must be abolished”.
Another post she shared said that Zionism was “undoubtedly, unquestionably the Nazism of our time”.
During last year’s general election campaign, after the JC had revealed extreme anti-Israel posts on social media by Green candidates who were later dropped, the party’s deputy leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, denied that the party vetting problem and said any suggestion that it had a problem with antisemitic candidates would be a “huge overstretch”.
